On May 13th the bioinformatics and systems biology communities from McGill and the University of Toronto met for a day of talks, posters, and discussions. This was the first time the two communities, both well-known research centers, had ever come together to explore areas of mutual interest and opportunities for future collaboration. The workshop is […]

If you access Twitter through a smartphone, then chances are that you use online social platforms quite differently from those who use web browsers and desktop clients to login to their accounts. This is the general finding advanced in a paper by Mathieu Perreault and Derek Ruths that was recently accepted to the International Conference […]

On Wednesday March 23rd, our lab hosted the first in a series of workshops introducing and exploring the power and ease of the Python programming language. Organized by Professor Derek Ruths and Mathieu Perreault, the workshop attracted more than 80 attendees, most of them students from McGill University. The purpose of this first Python workshop […]

This past Saturday, I had the amazing opportunity to speak at TEDxMcGill 2010. Much like the now-famous TED talks, this event was organized around an afternoon of 10-18 minute talks delving into “ideas worth spreading.” In my talk, I discussed what spoons, cancer cells, Ancient Roman roads, and online social networks all share in common: […]

Artificial intelligence, despite being a field of research unto itself, provides many powerful techniques that can solve problems across the computing sciences. This fall we’re reading through one of the best known textbooks on the topic: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.”

One way of figuring out what something does is by taking it away. Pull the leg off of a table and you’ll find out that it was providing support. Biologists do this to cells to figure out how genes work: remove a gene and see what happens to the cell. If it dies, for example, […]

About us

The Network Dynamics Lab is run by Professor Derek Ruths and is part of the McGill University School of Computer Science. We consist of one professor, a band of graduate students, and a cohort of undergrads - but more importantly we're curious people who enjoy writing code, playing with UNIX, and seeing what social media can tell us about the human condition. In our research we seek to develop new ways of measuring and modeling large-scale human behavior including online social platforms, NYT bestsellers, human communities, political parties, and ancient civilizations.

Join in

Our work requires proficiency in UNIX, programming (python is preferred!), and data analysis. Most importantly, though, we want self-motivated, critical thinkers who would jump at the chance to spend the odd weekend trudging through gigabytes of data to find the answer they're in search of.

If this sounds like you, send Professor Ruths an email. In addition to the usual details, describe a really hard problem you solved and how you did it. Extra points if it involves social informatics.